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“You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with songs of deliverance”

Tori Kelly ‘s new album HIDING PLACE, is rich in R&B and Gospel. I thought it was an uplifting album that was very encouraging and inspiring.

Part of her own inspiration came from Kirk Franklin, a 12-time Grammy Award winning gospel artist and long-time musical icon. Together the two of them collaborated on this album, and I thought all the songs were very beautiful.

As Kelly explains, the title to Hiding Place draws inspiration from a line in one of her favorite psalms (“You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with songs of deliverance”). “That always stuck with me: this idea of God being a place of safety, a place where you can hide from all the crazy things that this world can throw at us,” she notes.

Produced by Franklin, Hiding Place unfolds with a lush yet simply adorned sound beautifully suited to Kelly’s incomparable voice. “I’ve worked with Mary J. Blige, Bono, Yolanda Adams, and I’ve never seen anyone that’s a monster behind the microphone like Tori Kelly,” says Franklin. “She’d nail one song in three takes, and all those takes were amazing. It set the bar higher for my whole career.”

As she gets ready to share Hiding Place with the world, Kelly hopes that it might give others the same sense of solace and joy she’s found in gospel in her entire life. And as the album’s creator, one of the most rewarding aspects of Hiding Place was embracing gospel’s boundless intensity, and pushing her vocal performance like never before. “With gospel music, you can’t sing without all your heart being in it,” says Kelly. “This album was an opportunity to not only express my faith and my love for God, but to do what I felt and never hold back. I could just be free and let the song take me over.”

ABOUT

On her new album Hiding Place, L.A.-based singer/songwriter Tori Kelly honors her deepest musical passion and delivers an R&B-infused, infectiously melodic take on classic gospel. The follow-up to her full-length debut Unbreakable Smile—a 2015 release that premiered at #2 on the Billboard 200—Hiding Place finds the co-star of the 2016 feature film Sing teaming up with 12-time Grammy Award-winning gospel legend Kirk Franklin. With a lush yet simply adorned sound beautifully suited to Kelly’s incomparable voice, the Franklin-produced album includes such standouts as the slow-burning, harmony-infused lead single “Help Us to Love” and the powerfully radiant, full-choir-driven “Soul’s Anthem.”

As she embraces gospel’s boundless intensity and pushes her vocal performance like never before, Hiding Place offers up what Franklin refers to as “hope-pop”—a classification that fully resonates with Kelly. “One of the things I want for this album is for people to feel uplifted and encouraged when they listen,” says the 2016 Grammy Award nominee for Best New Artist, who’s now at work on her next pop album. “I want them to know that, no matter what they’re going through, there’s a God who loves them so much and so unconditionally, and there’s always a reason to feel hope. That’s what I really believe in, and I want everyone out there to hear my heart.”